Sr. Software Engineering Manager, Solr Search - Apple Service Engineering

Location: New York

Sr. Software Engineering Manager, Solr Search - Apple Service Engineering

New York City, New York, United States Software and Services

Apple’s Solr team builds and operates large-scale Apache Solr deployments that power search across many of Apple’s most essential internet services, including iCloud, Music, TV, and Maps. The platform is foundational to the search experience at Apple, and your work will directly shape products used by hundreds of millions of people.

We are seeking a seasoned engineering leader to guide an established team of Solr experts and drive the evolution of Apple’s search infrastructure.

Description

In this role, you will lead a team responsible for delivering a high-performance, scalable, and reliable Solr platform that meets Apple’s rapidly evolving product needs. The team owns both the operation of Apple-scale Solr clusters and contributions to Solr open source, client libraries, and the surrounding control plane.

You will define technical direction, uphold engineering rigor, and ensure operational excellence across the Solr ecosystem. You will hire, mentor, and grow engineers working on internal platform capabilities as well as upstream open-source efforts.

Close collaboration with SRE, EPM, and product teams is essential to align platform strategy, drive clarity, and support customer-facing initiatives.

You are someone who:

- Holds a high bar for quality and engineering excellence
- Leads with clarity, empathy, and accountability
- Can dive deep into technical and operational details when needed
- Challenges assumptions constructively and brings structure to ambiguity
- Builds strong partnerships across organizations

Responsibilities

• Define and communicate team priorities that support broader organizational goals; align strategy and decision-making across partner teams
• Set clear expectations, provide ongoing coaching, and support career development for engineers and managers
• Develop mid-term technical direction and roadmap, and evolve it as infrastructure and product requirements change
• Guide and review system designs, providing technical insight and context for complex or ambiguous problems
• Ensure high operational standards across large-scale Solr deployments and related platform components

Minimum Qualifications

• 5+ years of people-management experience leading and developing engineering teams, including managing managers
• Demonstrated success building and scaling platform or infrastructure teams
• Deep expertise in Solr, Elasticsearch, Open Search, or Lucene
• Strong technical leadership driving complex, cross-functional projects
• Extensive software development experience with a solid understanding of distributed systems (consensus, consistency, fault tolerance)
• Advanced knowledge of algorithms, data structures, and performance considerations for large-scale search platforms
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep familiarity with Kafka as part of large-scale distributed systems, with the ability to guide design decisions, optimize throughput, and ensure resilient data flow across services
• Experience with compute/container platforms (e.g., Kubernetes)
• Experience contributing to open-source projects, ideally Apache Solr or related ecosystems
• Hands-on experience with vector search

At Apple, base pay is one part of our total compensation package and is determined within a range. This provides the opportunity to progress as you grow and develop within a role. The base pay range for this role is between $228,100 and $342,800, and your base pay will depend on your skills, qualifications, experience, and location.
Apple employees also have the opportunity to become an Apple shareholder through participation in Apple’s discretionary employee stock programs. Apple employees are eligible for discretionary restricted stock unit awards, and can purchase Apple stock at a discount if voluntarily participating in Apple’s Employee Stock Purchase Plan. You’ll also receive benefits including:
Comprehensive medical and dental coverage, retirement benefits, a range of discounted products and free services, and for formal education related to advancing your career at Apple, reimbursement for certain educational expenses — including tuition. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary bonuses or commission payments as well as relocation. Learn more about Apple Benefits.

Note:

Apple benefit, compensation and employee stock programs are subject to eligibility requirements and other terms of the applicable plan or program.

Apple is an equal opportunity employer that is committed to inclusion and diversity. We seek to promote equal opportunity for all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, Veteran status, or other legally protected characteristics. Learn more about your EEO rights as an applicant .

Apple accepts applications to this posting on an ongoing basis.

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